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All posts for the month November, 2016

ARE YOU SINGLE? At times this can seem like a four-letter curse word. When you get this dreaded question from family, friends, the random guy at Starbucks, it makes your insides cringe. What’s worse, is the dreaded response that usually follows your hesitant affirmation. Have you ever heard this response, “Oh…you’re SINGLE? Oh, ok. Well, just keep waiting, your someone will come”?

So that’s what we do. We wait. And we wait. Then, we wait some more. Until hopefully, one day, we wake up and decide to ask the determining question: WHAT am I waiting for? In the answer, I believe lies our freedom to enjoy this time. When we begin to look at our lives and decide that “waiting” requires action, we will start to look for the things that we should be doing in our Single Season.

So, why is this journey prolonged, or why does it often seem like stop and go traffic? Just when we think a lane is opening up and we are making progress, we inch back to a standstill. From my extensive experience, I think for a couple of reasons. One reason could be that our first single spell (or if you are like me-spells), only matured us to a fraction of our potential. We see better than we did before, yet everything is not as clear as it could be. We can recognize some red flags, but we are still missing huge yellow caution signs. Next, they (no one ever knows who “they” is) say that repetition is a key component of memorization and internalization. That’s what we want to do: internalize the Word and allow God to make us whole. I don’t know about you, but I was so fired up and ready to experience the fullness of this season with God, before my last break-up, and after the healing of the one before that, and…well, you get the picture. My utmost desire was to wholeheartedly serve the Lord while I waited. Little did I know that this period would be challenged.

Let me explain. I felt the urge to do a 30 day cleanse, a dating detox. A time where I tuned out everything and tuned into my everything, Christ. But right before I started my own personal 30-day challenge, I met a guy. During the challenge, I was so excited and in communion with the Lord that nothing progressed with said guy, because I was focused. Shortly after the challenge concluded, he made his move. He began to seduce me. (Note here: the Lord woos, the devil seduces- there is a big difference.) I’m not saying this guy was the devil-far from it. Maybe. But he was used as a distraction, or maybe even a test, to see if I was truly ready to live the life I had just spent a month challenging myself, and inadvertently others, to live.

This guy seemed to be great. At the beginning, who isn’t, right? But, in retrospect he wasn’t that great at all. He had flaws and a lot of them, but I refused to acknowledge them. Due to circumstances and me reading too much into just normal occurrences, I had deemed him “the one”, with no input from God. I saw signs early on that he didn’t treat me the way “the one” would, but I excused them and wrote them off as “he’s not there yet, but he’s trying.” I hadn’t internalized the fact that he needed to be fully submitted to God before I could submit to him. Needless to say, that’s over. As they say, ‘let God make a man out of him, before you try to make him a husband.’ But I never listen to they, so this was a hard lesson to learn.

My struggle-your lesson. Obviously, I am that blind man in Mark 8:22-24 that didn’t become whole the first time around. I saw, but it wasn’t clear. Challenging myself to re-do The 30 Day Challenge gave me the clarity that I need to come out seeing everything more clearly. I didn’t just want to be better, I wanted to be my best. What your reading right now is the challenge that was done on social media, now compiled into a book.

Each day you will read a different insight and lesson along with the challenge for that day. In Mark, Jesus was brought a blind man to be healed. He spit on the man’s eyes and asked him, ‘What do you see?’ Here the blind man had a choice. He was better than he had ever been in his life, he could see something when before he couldn’t see anything. Surely, this was good enough. But, the same crossroads that he stood at is the very one that I challenge you to see. “Do you want to just be better, or do you want to be whole?’ The blind man, realizing he was in the presence of The Answer, decided to be honest about where he was. Don’t be fooled, Jesus knew that he wasn’t fully healed yet, but He wanted to know what was in the man’s heart. God wants us to admit that we still need Him, that although we have felt His touch before, we need more. Are you bold enough to ask Jesus to touch your season again, so that you can see everything clearly?

When Jesus healed the blind man, he spit on his eyes, touched them and then touched them again. Your healing will be a process as well. I look forward to the way that God will deposit fresh manna into your life through this challenge.

My only requirement is that you pray and open your heart to what God has to say to you. Even if you don’t think that a particular day applies to you, meditate on it. I believe that God is going to share something fresh with you each day, just as He did for me.

All 30 days will include a brief devotional, a key scripture to memorize, a Psalm to read, and a challenge or task to do and evaluate about Single season. Some may be new to you, and some may just be confirmation of a Word that the Lord has already given you.

Let’s go!

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I really hope that this is understood. I sincerely hope that my heart is heard in this. I know some people may get offended by this, and good. Hopefully those of you that find yourself in this category, get offended enough to do one of two things: 1. Start coming correct OR 2. Stop coming at all.

Many of y’all may not be ready to be this real, and still say Amen, so if that’s you, then you might want to stop reading right now…for the rest of y’all…leggo.

Here’s the thing…

There’s a worldly term called a ‘Fboy’. Yep, you know what the F is for. This is a guy that literally comes for himself, he has no intention to do right by you, and maybe not any girl at this point, but he still lurks into your life, stirs up your emotions, get you sucked in and attached, and then catches ghost. It’s like his sole purpose is to see if he can get you, and he will often pursue the heck out of you to get your attention. Work overtime to prove that he is worthy of you, that is – until he gets you. Then a switch flips, and the things he did to get you become a foreign language and it’s like he does the opposite, all the while trying to convince you that YOU are the problem. Like your expecting of him to even remotely live up to the man that he pretended to be to get your attention, is preposterous. In this case, the F has now changed to, Bruh, get the… yeah, you understand me.

So recently I was trying to come up with a word that would describe a Fboy but a man that’s in the church. Talking to friend, we came up with an ‘Lboy.’ L stands for Lucifer. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe a dude that is in the church supposedly loves God, maybe a minister, but definitely serving in ministry, yet he’s coming for girls knowing he has no intention of actually developing a relationship with them. John 8:44 says ‘You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’ Bruh, if this don’t hit the nail right on his slimy puny head! Lies flow freely from his lips as he woos you with his servant’s heart, but serpent tendencies.

What I will never understand is why do the Lboys come for girls that they know are looking for a relationship? They prey on the women looking for a man to pursue them, those looking for the promise of what Christ tells us to wait for — an example of what the church tells us to wait for. Why do these dudes come for these girls? Why not try for a girl that just came to the church to get a form of godliness but denying the power of it? Why not seek out the girls that don’t really want you because you’re Christian but they want you because they can tell Mama that you Christian, but they really know how you are behind closed doors? Here’s the answer I’ve come up with. Because these girls are too easy. They don’t require a challenge and they don’t satisfy that innate pull that says ‘this is the girl you SHOULD be with, even if you aren’t man enough to be worthy of her’. The girls that these Lboys should be going for would accept them for who that are, and not call them to be something different, something more. Those girls would accept your inconsistencies, your lies, your lack of pursuit, your broken promises and dates, your ‘I’ll call you right back’ turning into 2 days, your ‘my phone died, but I just saw you post on Snapchat’ thinly veiled tactics. So of course you won’t come for them. They know that they are an option and not the priority, but these women (God bless their hearts), haven’t realized their worth yet, so they accept this because they have believed the lies of your father that tell them that they can’t do better than you. B, please.

So on behalf of all the tired women that know their worth, and are exhausted with your foolishness, go get you a chick that ain’t talking bout nothing, and leave us the hell alone. Real talk. With everything in me, leave me the hell alone. If you not talking about pursuing us, if you not talking about putting forth the effort and the time that it will take to actually get to know us, leave us be. I mean this with every fiber of my being. I’m tired of hearing women, my friends and loves, talking about meeting a dude that supposedly loves God, I mean love the Lord and serving in church and doing all this and that, and getting her hopes up, not due to created fantasies, but actually believing that a guy would actually mean what he says. Then turn around a couple weeks later and this dude has either tried to sleep with her, or is talking to several other girls at the same time or treating her like an option and not a priority. He’s started to not honor her, not pursue her, and now she is doubting herself and trying to find the warning signs that she missed. Many times, we do miss the warning signs, but sometimes, y’all jokers show up like a traffic jam at 2am, completely unexpected. You hide yourself well, and then when it’s time to showup, we realize all too quickly, that you have absolutely no substance. Bruh, how do you go to sleep at night? How do you stand up and minister in the morning, knowing that your lifestyle is not conducive to what you’re saying? You don’t feel any conviction? Like nothing? I don’t understand and to be honest I really don’t want to understand, may I never be able to relate to that mentality. But I must say it and please listen to me…if you not talking about nothing if you don’t really want a woman worthy of the man that you pretended to be…

LEAVE.US.THE.HELL.ALONE.

I’ve seen this too often and it needs to be addressed. I sincerely wish more men that are truly living Godly and looking to pursue a wife, would stand up and say this. Because the truth is, they aren’t just messing with the women’s hearts, they are messing with your future wife’s heart. They are causing pain and wounds, that God will have to heal, before she can be ready for you. They are causing trust issues that, even after getting healed, will still fight to try to show up in your marriage. They are making women skeptical of giving YOU a chance, because her heart has been mangled more in the church, than in the world. Speak up, grab a young man and teach him. Don’t look away and dismiss it as ‘I would never do that’, because real talk, this Lboy is just as much your problem as he is ours.*